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GERALD PEARY

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Review: Somers Town

Shane Meadows' latest triumph
At just 70 minutes, Shane Meadows's film is short, sweet, and winning.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 02, 2009

Review: I Sell the Dead

Grave errors
Glenn McQuaid's graveyard-set fright-flick send-up is a low-budget valentine to "B" horrors of yore.

By: GERALD PEARY | August 26, 2009

Review: Fifty Dead Men Walking

Fast-paced but uninvolving
In the 1980s in Northern Ireland, a petty hustler named Martin McGartland (Jim Sturgess) went from street-corner obscurity to playing a major role in the war in Belfast between Catholics and Protestants, as he swore allegiance to the militant branch of the IRA while spying for the British police.

By: GERALD PEARY | August 19, 2009

Review: The Silence Before Bach

Perplexing
Catalonian avant-garde filmmaker Pere Portabella expresses his adoration of Johann Sebastian Bach through an odd, rambling, privately formed essay that all too rarely connects with the viewer.

By: GERALD PEARY | August 13, 2009

Review: The End of the Line

Doomsday from under the sea
Eating fish is great for you — but it's a different story for the poor fish.

By: GERALD PEARY | July 22, 2009

Review: In a Dream

Unusual, probing, and honest
For seven years, Jeremiah Zagar has had the camera rolling as his hippie parents keep their symbiotic marriage afloat — though Isaiah, his fragile painter dad, teeters on the edge of lunacy.

By: GERALD PEARY | July 01, 2009

Review: Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight

Smitten with its subject, with good reason.
In Wendy Keys's extreme hagiography, nobody on earth seems to have a bad word about graphic designer Milton Glaser, either his art or his person.

By: GERALD PEARY | June 24, 2009

Review: Women of Faith

Means well, but the execution is flawed
Rebecca M. Alvin's documentary is a sincere attempt to understand the call to a Catholic religious vocation, but it's confused and disorganized in its telling.

By: GERALD PEARY | June 24, 2009

Newman's own

Mainstream life, good read
Among Shawn Levy's books is one of my favorite film bios, King of Comedy , with crazy-guy Jerry Lewis, so show-off goofy and schmaltzy, spilling all on every exuberant, excessive page.

By: GERALD PEARY | June 24, 2009

Review: Treeless Mountain

Bruising, but not all pessimism
Korean-American filmmaker So Yong Kim went back to her South Korean childhood, which she spent being shuttled from relative to relative, for her vivid, bruising autobiographical tale of two young girls in Seoul who struggle to make do after being abandoned by their mother.

By: GERALD PEARY | June 16, 2009

Review: Lake Tahoe

Tired tropes
It's a tough time for Mexican teen Juan (Diego Cataño): his dad died recently, his mom is angry and depressed, and his younger sister is needy and lonely.

By: GERALD PEARY | June 03, 2009

Review: Katyn

Chilling
Andrzej Wajda was Poland's most revered filmmaker during the long Communist era.

By: GERALD PEARY | May 27, 2009

Review: Scenes from a Parish

Father Paul saves Lawrence
James Rutenbeck's modest, old-fashioned, simply shot documentary is exactly the right way to tell a story of old-time verities and virtues, daily life in a Catholic parish in Lawrence

By: GERALD PEARY | April 08, 2009

Mother courage

Agnès Varda in Toronto
The 2008 Toronto International Film Festival last September proved hospitable to Agnès Varda.

By: GERALD PEARY | March 10, 2009

Review: Absurdistan

A ripe, magic-realism-lite tale of life
Delicatessen sort of meets Borat in Veit Helmer's visually ripe, magic-realism-lite tale of life in a mythical Eastern European country that time forgot after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc.

By: GERALD PEARY | March 04, 2009

Review: Serbis

Does not do justice to the premise
There couldn't be a more promising set-up for a movie than the one in Brillante Mendoza's film: a family-run gay-porno-movie theater.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 25, 2009

Review: Two Lovers

Joaquin Phoenix's reported last film not interesting enough or deep enough
In what's bruited to be his last screen appearance, Joaquin Phoenix goes Marlon Brando mumbly.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 25, 2009

Review: Cherry Blossoms

Well-crafted and sincere, but ultimately tiresome
In Doris Dörrie's emotionally loaded melodrama Kirschblüten — Hanami , an aging German couple, Trudi (Hannelore Eisner) and Rudi (Elmer Wrapper), grow tighter than ever.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 12, 2009

Review: Wild Child

Learning curve, part I
Like others who toil in the classroom (I’m a long-time film-studies professor at Suffolk University), I constantly fret over whether all those semesters of teacher talk have made a bona fide dent in students’ lives.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 04, 2009

Review: The Class

Learning curve, part II
Bégaudeau is a real-life teacher who penned a memoir, Entre les murs (the film’s original French title), about his time in the classroom.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 04, 2009

Review: Donkey Punch

Bodies, bodies everywhere
Three young gals from Leeds on a pleasure trip to Spain hook up with four randy British sailors and head out to the ocean on a borrowed yacht.

By: GERALD PEARY | January 27, 2009

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